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The Faculty of Law at McGill University, in conjunction with the Paul-André Crépeau Centre for Private and Comparative Law, is delighted to announce that applications are being received for a Fulbright Visiting Chair in Private and Comparative Law for 2014-15. This is an opportunity for an established US scholar to spend one semester at McGill during that academic year. It carries a stipend of $25,000 and so provides a generous opportunity for someone who is benefiting from sabbatical or other paid leave. The deadline to apply is 1 August 2013. Questions may be addressed to Professor Lionel Smith, Director of the Pau-André Crépeau Centre, at Lionel.Smith@McGill.ca.

Friday Oct. 25 & Saturday Oct. 26, 2013, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Paper Submission Deadline: Friday, July 12, 2013, midnight (EST).

The Eighth Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS 2013), sponsored by the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) will be held at The University of Pennsylvania Law School, in Philadelphia, PA, on Friday, October 25 and Saturday, October 26, 2013. The conference features original empirical legal scholarship by leading scholars from a diverse range of fields.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: To submit a paper for consideration, please go to the CELS 2013 Conference Maker page at: https://editorialexpress.com/conference/CELS2013. There is no charge for submissions. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Washington and Lee law professor Brant Hellwig has had one of his articles selected for inclusion on a list of Notable Corporate Tax Articles of 2012. The list was compiled by Karen C. Burke of the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Jordan M. Barry of the University of San Diego School of Law for the purpose of drawing attention to the year’s most thoughtful and insightful articles on corporate tax.

Prof. Hellwig’s article, coauthored with Gregg Polsky (North Carolina), is titled “Examining the Tax Advantage of Founders’ Stock” and was published in in the University of Iowa Law Review. From the abstract:

Recent commentary has described founders’ stock as tax-advantaged because it converts founders’ compensation income into capital gains. In this paper we describe various founders’ stock strategies that offer this character conversion and then analyze whether they are, on the whole, tax advantageous. While the founders’ stock strategies favorably convert the character of the founders’ income, they simultaneously turn the company’s compensation deductions into non-deductions. Whether founders’ stock is tax-advantaged overall depends on whether the benefit of the founders’ character conversion outweighs the cost of the company’s lost deductions. We use various hypothetical to illustrate this tradeoff. We conclude that founders’ stock is likely to be significantly tax-advantaged only in those cases where the start up company shows great promise early on but ultimately never develops into a profitable enterprise.

Even in that subset of cases where founders’ stock turns out to be tax-advantaged, the advantage exists only because of the tax law’s overly harsh treatment of net operating losses. Therefore, whatever tax advantage that exists for founders’ stock is best viewed as a partial move towards the optimal treatment of tax losses, not as a stand-alone tax benefit that needs to be eliminated.

If, as they say, timing is everything, then W&L Law Professor Russell Miller has hit upon something very special with his recent receipt of a KoRSE Fellowship at the University of Freiburg in Germany. With the media still buzzing over the news of Edmund Snowden’s evasion of an American warrant after he leaked confidential documents that chronicle the American government’s extensive PRISM surveillance program and other secret surveillance activities, Miller has been invited to serve as a Fellow in the University of Freiburg’s “Network for the Law of Civil Security in Europe.” The fellowship will allow him to research and collaborate with leading scholars on the issues of security and liberty who are based at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Civil Security as well as the program’s partners at Bucerius Law School (Hamburg), the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (Freiburg), and the German Federal Police Academy.

Miller will be in residence in Freiburg on several occasions in the 2013/2014 academic year, beginning with a three-week stay in July, 2013. “I’m thrilled about the opportunity to work closely with dynamic scholars on these issues at one of Germany’s most impressive law faculties,” Miller said. He noted that the University of Frieburg is the academic home of two of the German Constitutional Court’s justices, including the Court’s President, Prof. Andreas Vosskuhle. “The KoRSE program is especially exciting,” Miller explained, “because it deliberately seeks to embed discussions of this inherently transnational issue in a global research context.”

During his time in Freiburg Professor Miller will pursue several projects. First, he will deliver a lecture on July 10, drawing on his 2008 book U.S. National Security, Intelligence and Democracy (Routledge Press). The book reflected on the 1970s Senate Select Committee that undertook an extensive investigation of U.S. national security activities. Known as the “Church Committee” (for its Chair, Idaho Senator Frank Church), the Senate Select Committee’s reports remain one of the most detailed accountings of the American intelligence community and the reports served as the basis for reforms that now make-up the legal and oversight framework for American intelligence programs. This, of course, is the very framework implicated by Snowden’s leaks and the PRISIM program. Miller’s lecture will detail, for a foreign audience unfamiliar with this important piece of American history, the background of the Church Committee while raising the broader questions of how a society best achieves the twin goals of providing security while ensuring liberty. Second, Prof. Miller will begin planning-in close collaboration with other researchers in Freiburg-for the fall 2013 “German Law in Context Program,” which will involve a number W&L law and undergraduate students in an intensive, interdisciplinary survey of Germany’s efforts to balance security and liberty in its unique struggle with extremism and threats to democracy. The German Law in Context Program is an annual seminar that enjoys the support of the German Law Journal, which Prof. Miller and a number of students edit at W&L. It is also one of the law school’s most visible collaborations with W&L’s undergraduate college, as faculty from the German/Russian Department, the History Department, and the Williams School’s Political Science Faculty contribute their expertise to events and programming in significant ways. Third, Prof. Miller will use his time in Freiburg to lay a research foundation for and to facilitate his in-person observations of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s imminent review of applications to ban a political party (the right-wing NPD). This is a once-in-a-generation procedure that implicates German history, society and politics in remarkable ways. In this effort, Prof. Miller will be building on the work that led to the recent publication of his book The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (Duke Press).

The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law invites submissions to fill a panel on “New Voices in Comparative Law,” to be held at the Society’s 2013 Annual Meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, on October 10-12 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law. The purpose of the panel is to highlight the scholarship of new and younger comparativists.

Submissions will be accepted on any subject of public or private comparative law from scholars who have been engaged as law teachers for ten years or fewer as of July 1, 2013.

The Scholarship Advisory Group of the Younger Comparativists Committee will review submissions with the authors’ identities concealed. A maximum of two submissions will be chosen for the panel. Submissions will not be accepted from scholars whose work has been featured in a prior younger scholars’ panel at the Society’s Annual Meeting.

The scholars whose entries are selected for the panel will be required to submit a final paper no longer than 30,000 words by August 22, 2013.

To submit an entry, scholars should email an abstract of no more than 1000 words (including footnotes) no later than 12:00pm EST on June 24, 2013, to Judy Yi at the following address: judy.yi@bc.edu. Abstracts should reflect original research that will not yet have been published by the time of the Society’s Annual Meeting. The abstract should be accompanied by a separate cover sheet indicating the author’s name, title of the paper, institutional affiliation, and contact information. The abstract itself must not contain any references that identify the author or the author’s institutional affiliation.

The Younger Comparativists Committee is pleased to announce that LexisNexis will award a Book Prize to the author of the paper judged most meritorious by the Scholarship Advisory Group.

The JSIP Workshop offers a unique opportunity for junior scholars writing in the areas of intellectual property, communications, and cyberlaw to receive detailed commentary on their work from established scholars in a focused workshop setting. Articles will be chosen through a blind-review selection process. Participants must commit to attend the entire Workshop.

WHEN: Friday and Saturday, October 4-5, 2013, Michigan State University College of Law

QUALIFICATIONS: Eligible junior scholars have seven or fewer years of full-time teaching experience.

We hope this message finds you well. The U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program competition is currently open and seeking applicants for a specialized award in Law (Award 4033) at one of three institutions in Ghana:

Please e-mail kmiller@iie.org for more information or to discuss your application.

The 2014-15 Catalog of Awards is online at http://catalog.cies.org/. There are new initiatives, including flex awards, postdoc opportunities, and a worldwide TEFL award. In addition, the lifetime limit on Fulbright grants has been lifted. We also have information online about the program in general, tips for applying, project statement guidelines, and much more on the US Scholar page.